Disassembly Required. Geoff Mann

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6 Some of the better-known Physiocrats include Francois Quesnay, Richard Cantillon, and Jean-Baptiste Say (of “Say’s Law,” on which more to come in the section on J. M. Keynes below).

7 “Factors of production” is still a common term in economics today (although one hears much less about land). The term “economic growth” has, however, only been in common usage since World War II.

8 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 484–85.

9 The term “neoclassical” with respect to economics was coined in 1900 by the American economist Thorstein Veblen, the same person who first discussed “conspicuous consumption.”

10 This helps explain some interesting features of monetary history that sometimes confuse us moderns, like the enormous stone “coins” of some ancient cultures. These were not money as we understand it today; rather, in essentially non-monetary social formations, “monetary” exchange was confined to very specific exchange conditions. These involved, unsurprisingly, significant ceremony—like the movement or change in ownership of a ten-ton “coin.”

11 W-G-W, Ware-Geld-Ware, in Marx’s German.

12 One thing to keep in mind, however, is that it would have to be all workers who enjoyed this transformative wage; history suggests that if it is just a fraction of workers, then the lucky few who earn “enough” tend to become much less interested in transformation.

13 It is interesting to note that Marx argued that the “valuation” of labour’s contribution to capitalist production processes could not be called “unjust,” since the meaning of justice is determined by the social relations of production in specific historical conditions. In capitalist society, “justice” is a capitalist standard. There are no “unjust” wages in capitalism, according to Marx; what was unjust (and clearly not by capitalist standards, but by the revolutionary ethics Marx espoused) was the wage relation itself.

14 For those familiar with a little bit of economic terminology, this is the basis of what is now called “general equilibrium” theory, the hallmark of modern neoclassical analysis. The “general” part refers to the entire set (the “vector”) of prices within an economy. The idea that those relative prices can find a system-wide equilibrium is the heart of the neoclassical theory of value, a theory often called “Walrasian,” after the seminal contributions of Léon Walras, a nineteenth-century Swiss economist. Walras did more than perhaps anyone else to reshape economics along the lines of a natural science like physics. If we had to choose one text as the foundation of modern, mathematized, neoclassical economics, it would have to be his Elements of Pure Economics (1877). “Pure” presumably meant “assuming away all that complicated real-life stuff.”

15 As we will see, the end of Keynesianism, and “return” of neoclassical economics in the postwar era, has also involved the reassertion of the theory of monetary neutrality, although it is now dressed up in a range of complex conceptual costumes (e.g., money-in-the-utility-function) that obscure it.

16 It sounds crazy, but this idea still circulates in powerful circles. Not only do some modern economists still believe it—see the passages below on the Chicago School—but even those who don’t must assume that if it weren’t for “imperfections,” markets would be perfect, and there would be no idle resources, like unemployed workers, hanging around.

      3. State Power and the Power of Money